Servers

Note

Currently the only usable server is the reference implementation, Synapse. Developers are hard at work on Dendrite, Ruma, and others but they aren’t quite ready yet.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

If you are trying to install a Matrix server, the best way to install Synapse is using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. In minutes, it will give you a 100% correct Matrix installation with very little effort. You’ll get everything you need: Synapse (the reference Matrix homeserver) configured to use a PostgresQL database, coturn for audio calls, Riot (a nice web client), nginx, a mail server, and much more but you can easily disable any of those. This way of setting Synapse up also has some of the best documentation anywhere in the Matrix community. If you find an easier way to install Synapse, call me. Until then, this is the easiest.

Official Installation Guide

If you are scared of Docker or Ansible, don’t be, it isn’t that hard… but if you still are then you can install Synapse using it’s official installation guide. Just remember that I warned you. There are going to be a lot of manual steps you’ll need to do to get a good setup whereas the above does it all for you.

Tip

There are many other tutorials on the internet since Synapse has been around for several years. However you should be aware that a lot changed in Early 2019 to make sure everything was production ready. If the tutorial you are looking at was not written or updated in February 2019 or later, then you should not follow it.